


Day at work.

by Puimoo



Category: Dragon Kishi-dan | Dragon Knights
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-07 04:20:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16401227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Puimoo/pseuds/Puimoo
Summary: Kai-stern is having a bad day.





	Day at work.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dragonofeternal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofeternal/gifts).



Kai-stern allows the ale to slide down his throat, all fire and burn. He has been weeks on the road, exists as nothing more than grime and dirt held together with an ill temperament and a rather desperate desire for a bath. There are travels that carry him deep into green valleys and into the heart of besieged cities, but nothing quite leaves him ground down to his most base emotions as days spent part of a desert caravan. He has long since forgone thoughts of sand, it is everywhere now and has simply become another layer of skin. But it is the dry lash of the wind, salt-laden and rip roar that infuses him with a heat that has nothing to do with the cheap drink (he drowns a second, and then a third), and which even a canvas full of water cannot douse. It is a heat that tingles across his skin – tears strips from it and leaves him feeling unsteady and raw – and really. Information gathering is difficult enough as it is when you’re not miserably being torn apart by the physical environment as opposed to the political one Kai-stern is more accustomed to.

Kai-stern stands out, a beacon in white amongst a tribe of deeply tanned, bleached blond, vaguely sympathetic travellers who are somehow still convinced that Kai-stern is on a futile business quest for a far wealthier baron. 

It is not exactly a stretch. Kai-stern is here specifically at the bequest of Lykouleon, and so far futile seems a rather adequate reflection of his mission thus far. There have been none of the hinted at conspiracies, nothing bartered and traded away beyond rock and stone and sanity. Lykouleon held only whispers, secret scratchings of something happening out in the desert, something dark and dry and beyond the world of sand and storm.

It sounds less a piece of information now and more a children’s riddle.

Fantastic.

Kai-stern drowns a forth drink, thinks when did that happen and how the room blurs now in streaks of torchlight and backlit eyes, wonders where the rest of the room has gone. There is a hand on his shoulder, heavy and calloused and Kai-stern tips gently in against it, heady now to the alarm bells that shrill obnoxiously through a head of sand and storm and bitter ale.

“I see our cargo has arrived,” a voice smears in his ear, and it seems utterly disconnected to the hand on his shoulder, the weight against his back. Kai-stern takes another sip of his drink.

“As agreed,” a cluster of eyes say, and it’s a pity as they are nice eyes, strong eyes. Five sets of eyes, perhaps, which means at least three or four too many, but they still all fall down when Kai-stern blinks first, then brings down his now empty jug hard in their general vicinity.

Kai-stern spins, totters, but his knife finds still soft flesh and a hollow howl.

_Finally,_ the drug addled (familiarly so) part of his brain cries as an elbow (his, he presumes) finds a stomach, a face, or perhaps a bar stool. It barely matters, as it carries him still to the front of the tavern. A couple of stabby type movements are followed by a slash of some sort (he thinks he’s using his sword here, he certainly hears a familiar whine through the air as he drags his arm down), and suddenly the entrance is before him, closed but more inviting that everything else he has passed through in the last minute.

He thrusts open the door-

And finds nothing but desert.

Kai-stern is starting to think that whoever deemed that an oasis was a place of sanctuary really hadn’t done their homework.

Kai-stern closes the door again, turns again, leans back against the door with a casual indifference that carries a world weariness that Kai-stern feels deep, deep in his bones.

“So,” He says, in a standoff with a dozen/hundred eyes and far too many flashes of silver. “Exactly who are you planning to sell me on to, and am I at least allowed a shower first?”

It is, Kai-stern thinks, as something sharp pings him in his left shoulder and sends him inelegantly slinking into blackness, the least that they could offer in return.


End file.
